Today in Iraq

March 15 was another defining moment in America’s downward moral-spiral in Iraq. Eleven members of an Iraqi family were killed in a wanton act of slaughter executed by American occupiers. Photos taken at the scene show the lifeless bodies of young children, barely old enough to walk, lying motionless in the back of a flatbed truck while their fathers moan inconsolably at their side. What parent can look at these photographs and not be consumed with rage? The US military openly admits it attacked the house in Ishaqi where the incident took place. Reuters reports that, “Major Ali Ahmed of the Ishaqi police said US forces landed on the roof of the house in the early hours and shot the 11 occupants, including five children.” “After they left the house they blew it up”, he said. “The bodies, their hands bound, had been dumped in one room before the house was destroyed,” (policeman) Hussein said. Police had found spent American issue cartridges in the rubble.” (Reuters) The autopsy report at the Tikrit hospital said, “All the victims had gunshot wounds to the head”. Iraqi policeman Farouq Hussein noted, “It is a clear and perfect crime without any doubt”. The evidence provided by Reuters suggests that we have entered the “My Lai phase” of the Iraq war, where the pretensions about democracy and liberation are stripped-away and replaced with the gratuitous butchery of women and children. The carnage in Ishaqi illustrates the growing recklessness and desperation of Washington’s failed crusade. Military spokesman Major Tim O’ Keefe justified the attack saying they were searching for “a foreign fighter facilitator” for Al Qaida in Iraq. He added, “Troops were engaged by enemy fire as they approached the building. Coalition Forces returned fire utilizing both air and ground assets….Two women and one child were killed. The building was destroyed.” In fact, 11 women and children were killed and there’s no evidence to verify that the house was being used as an Al Qaida safe-house. The US military made similar claims after bombing raids in January and December when a total of 17 family members were killed. The full Knight-Ridder report: Iraqi police have accused American troops of executing 11 people, including a 75-year-old woman and a 6-month-old infant, in the aftermath of a raid last Wednesday on a house about 60 miles north of Baghdad. The villagers were killed after American troops herded them into a single room of the house, according to a police document obtained by Knight Ridder Newspapers. The soldiers also burned three vehicles, killed the villagers' animals and blew up the house, the document said. A U.S. military spokesman, Major Tim Keefe, said that the U.S. military has no information to support the allegations and that he had not heard of them before a reporter brought them to his attention Sunday. "We're concerned to hear accusations like that, but it's also highly unlikely that they're true," he said. He added that U.S. forces "take every precaution to keep civilians out of harms' way. The loss of innocent life, especially children, is regrettable." Accusations that U.S. troops have killed civilians are commonplace in Iraq, though most are judged later to be unfounded or exaggerated. Navy investigators announced last week that they were looking into whether Marines intentionally killed 15 Iraqi civilians - four of them women and five of them children - during fighting last November [see below “What happened that morning in Haditha”]. But the report of the killings in the Abu Sifa area of Ishaqi, eight miles north of the city of Balad, is unusual because it originated with Iraqi police and because Iraqi police were willing to attach their names to it. The report, which also contained brief descriptions of other events in the area, was compiled by the Joint Coordination Center in Tikrit, a regional security center set up with United States military assistance. An Iraqi police colonel signed the report, which was based on communications from local police. Brig. Gen. Issa al-Juboori, who heads the center, said that his office assembled the report on Thursday and that it accurately reflects the direction of the current police investigation into the incident. He also said he knows the officer heading the investigation. "He's a dedicated policeman, and a good cop," he said when reached by phone in Tikrit from Baghdad. "I trust him." The case involves a U.S. raid conducted, according to the official U.S. account, in response to a tip that a member of al-Qaida in Iraq was at the house. Neighbors, interviewed by a special correspondent for Knight Ridder, agreed that the al-Qaida member was at the house. They said he was visiting the home's owner, a relative. The neighbors said the homeowner was a schoolteacher. According to police, military and eyewitness accounts, U.S. forces approached the house at around 2:30 a.m. and a firefight ensued. By all accounts, in addition to exchanging gunfire with someone inside the house, U.S. troops were supported by helicopter gunships, which fired on the house. But the accounts differ on what took place after the firefight. According to the U.S. account, the house collapsed because of the heavy fire. When U.S. forces searched the rubble they found one man, the al-Qaida suspect, alive. He was arrested. They also found a dead man they believed to be connected to al-Qaida, two dead women and a dead child. But the report filed by the Joint Coordination Center, which was based on a report filed by local police, said U.S. forces entered the house while it was still standing. "The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 persons, including five children, four women and two men," the report said. "Then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed their animals." The report identified the dead by name, giving their ages. The two men killed were 22 and 28. Of the women, one was 22, another was 23, a third was 30 and the fourth was 75. Two of the children were 5 years old, two were 3, and the fifth was 6 months old, the document said. The report was signed by Col. Fadhil Muhammed Khalaf, who was described in the document as the assistant chief of the Joint Coordination Center. A local police commander, Lt. Col. Farooq Hussain, interviewed by a Knight Ridder special correspondent in Ishaqi, said autopsies at the hospital in Tikrit "revealed that all the victims had bullet shots in the head and all bodies were handcuffed." Efforts to reach hospital spokesmen Sunday were unsuccessful. Keefe, the U.S. military spokesman, said that he had seen photographs of the victims and had not seen handcuffs, which caused him to doubt the validity of the report. He said, however, that he has no reason to doubt the body count provided by local police. "We conducted a preliminary investigation," he said. "They were the investigating officers on the ground." Keefe said that he didn't know which U.S. unit conducted the raid. An official account of the raid provided Sunday by the military also did not mention the unit involved by name. Ibraheem Hirat Khalaf, whose brother Faiz owned the house and was among the dead, said he watched and heard the assault from his home 100 yards away. He said that U.S. troops used six missiles from helicopters to destroy the house as they were leaving. Abu Hijran, 38, and a neighbor, said those in the house were liked and respected, though the wanted al-Qaida member was not as well known. Rasheed Thair, an employee of Ishaqi, said that the town was in a state of shock over the killings. "Everyone attended the funeral," he said. "We want the Americans to give an explanation for this horrible crime which took the smile and the dream of a spring night from 11 people, and destroyed even the simple toys of children." Three Knight Ridder Newspapers special correspondents contributed to this report. Their identities are being withheld for security reasons.

What happened that morning in Haditha: The incident seemed like so many others from this war, the kind of tragedy that has become numbingly routine amid the daily reports of violence in Iraq. On the morning of Nov. 19, 2005, a roadside bomb struck a humvee carrying Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, on a road near Haditha, a restive town in western Iraq. The bomb killed Lance Corporal Miguel (T.J.) Terrazas, 20, from El Paso, Texas. The next day a Marine communiqué from Camp Blue Diamond in Ramadi reported that Terrazas and 15 Iraqi civilians were killed by the blast and that "gunmen attacked the convoy with small-arms fire," prompting the Marines to return fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding one other. The Marines from Kilo Company held a memorial service for Terrazas at their camp in Haditha. They wrote messages like "T.J., you were a great friend. I'm going to miss seeing you around" on smooth stones and piled them in a funeral mound. And the war moved on. But the details of what happened that morning in Haditha are more disturbing, disputed and horrific than the military initially reported. According to eyewitnesses and local officials interviewed over the past 10 weeks, the civilians who died in Haditha on Nov. 19 were killed not by a roadside bomb but by the Marines themselves, who went on a rampage in the village after the attack, killing 15 unarmed Iraqis in their homes, including seven women and three children. Human-rights activists say that if the accusations are true, the incident ranks as the worst case of deliberate killing of Iraqi civilians by U.S. service members since the war began. In January, after TIME presented military officials in Baghdad with the Iraqis' accounts of the Marines' actions, the U.S. opened its own investigation, interviewing 28 people, including the Marines, the families of the victims and local doctors. According to military officials, the inquiry acknowledged that, contrary to the military's initial report, the 15 civilians killed on Nov. 19 died at the hands of the Marines, not the insurgents. The military announced last week that the matter has been handed over to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), which will conduct a criminal investigation to determine whether the troops broke the laws of war by deliberately targeting civilians. Lieut. Colonel Michelle Martin-Hing, spokeswoman for the Multi-National Force--Iraq, told TIME the involvement of the NCIS does not mean that a crime occurred. And she says the fault for the civilian deaths lies squarely with the insurgents, who "placed noncombatants in the line of fire as the Marines responded to defend themselves." Because the incident is officially under investigation, members of the Marine unit that was in Haditha on Nov. 19 are not allowed to speak with reporters. But the military's own reconstruction of events and the accounts of town residents interviewed by TIME--including six whose family members were killed that day--paint a picture of a devastatingly violent response by a group of U.S. troops who had lost one of their own to a deadly insurgent attack and believed they were under fire. TIME obtained a videotape that purports to show the aftermath of the Marines' assault and provides graphic documentation of its human toll. What happened in Haditha is a reminder of the horrors faced by civilians caught in the middle of war--and what war can do to the people who fight it.

Editorials Dither While Iraq Burns: Anyone who hoped that the third anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq would inspire the country’s leading newspapers to finally editorialize for a radical change in the White House’s war policy has to be disappointed, again. From this evidence, the editorial boards of The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the Knight Ridder collective, and others appear to be as clueless about what to do as are Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld. Reading the editorials, which mainly call for more of the same, puts you in a time warp: They could have been, perhaps were, written one year ago, maybe two. There's always a "turning point" to count on, from the transfer of power to this-time-we-mean-it-we-are-really-forming-a-unity-government. Reviving a Vietnam-era phrase, it is the nation's editorial voice that is the "pitiful, helpless giant," even as the American and Iraqi public, alike, call for the start of a withdrawal. On the other hand, the same newspapers -- and many others -- produced for the third anniversary on Sunday tough-minded and vital war coverage likely to make any thinking reader cry out in the direction of Washington, "Enough!" But that's nothing new. Reporters for most papers long ago revealed that the U.S. presence is Iraq is doing some good, but more harm. Then the editorial side proclaims: Let's stick around for more. As with their news coverage, the editorials are often harshly critical of the war and the administration. They inevitably say the right things. Yet, after all that, they claim despite no real evidence, that things will only get worse if we start even a very slow pullout or, gosh -- after three years with no end in sight -- set some kind of timetable for same. The New York Times, for example, cogently lays out everything that has gone criminally wrong, with little hope for improvement, but concludes with this ringing call for … what? "The Iraq debacle ought to serve as a humbling lesson for future generations of American leaders -- although, if our leaders were capable of being humbled, they could have simply looked back to Vietnam," the Times declares. "For the present, our goal must be to minimize the damage, through the urgent diplomacy of the current ambassador and forceful reminders that American forces are not prepared to remain for one day in a country whose leaders prefer civil war to peaceful compromise." Urgent diplomacy and forceful reminders: In other words, leave it to the incompetent gangs in Washington and Baghdad that the editorial has just eviscerated. Here is what the Times wrote on the first anniversary of the war in 2004: "Right now, our highest priority is making the best of a very disturbing situation." The "possibility" of "an Iraq flung into chaos and civil war, open to manipulation by every unscrupulous political figure and terrorist group in the Middle East, is too awful to contemplate." Two years later, we've got it. The Washington Post, for its part, did not run an editorial on the war on Sunday. It did offer an Op Ed by Donald Rumsfeld. "Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis," he wrote. What about The Los Angeles Times? No help there. It boasted that it "will resist the temptation to be fashionable and will take this opportunity to at least concede that the Bush administration's actions were rooted in a strain of American idealism most often identified with Woodrow Wilson." And: "Much of the mocking by Bush critics about the supposed absurdity of the administration's claims about weapons of mass destruction is revisionist nonsense." Think about all that for a minute. Then ponder that while the L.A. Times calls Iraq a "quagmire," says U.S. leaders are completely out of ideas, it concludes with this unconscionable call to inaction: "As it enters its fourth year, the war in Iraq defies simplistic characterizations from both ends of the political spectrum. The heroism of U.S. forces and of ordinary Iraqis going about their daily lives is inspiring. But the future of Iraq remains shrouded in gray uncertainty." And that's it. Even the folks at Knight Ridder, the chain which produced some of the toughest pre-war and war coverage, prove toothless in an editorial published in many of its papers, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, today. Like others during the past two years, it puts off any phased pullout until another "turning point" to come: "We helped make this mess; we have a moral obligation to try to leave Iraq in one piece. It is not an endless obligation, though. By the summer, it should be apparent whether Iraqi leaders can form a unity government that shuns violence." And what of Knight Ridder's likely new owner, McClatchy? That chain's California papers offered their own pointless assessment: "Bush has painted himself and this country into a dangerous corner from which no exit is in sight, save more years of bloodshed and misery in Iraq on the one hand or, on the other, a hasty U.S. departure that would dishonor America and leave Iraqis to cope with the tragedy visited upon them. It's been a long three years. How many more await?" Plenty more, if newspaper editorial pages (with a few brave exceptions) have anything to say about it. Where were the editorial writers' opinions on whether it was all worth it? On whether the US could continue to finance the Bush adventure? On whether America ought to be involved in nation-building? On the variety of proposals made for new diplomatic initiatives? On the many plans that have been put forward for withdrawal? Absent. AWOL. Silent. And the reason, it seems to me, is not fear of being called "unpatriotic." The reason is that most editorial writers don't have a clue about how to go forward. In which case, probably to their shock and awe, they have a lot in common with our president. But not with their readers.

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." --- William Casey, Director CIA (Quote from internal staff meeting notes 1981)